


hard candy

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Sibling Dynamic, Episode s02e07: Return, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24807697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: written for thesensory prompt"Shiv/Kendall -  99. hard candy dissolving in your mouth"
Relationships: Kendall Roy/Siobhan "Shiv" Roy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	hard candy

At the dining table, Caroline brought up her eighteenth year again, which was hardly surprising despite Shiv’s flustered kneejerk response. There was always some detail from that year that her mother could tie to whatever disappointment Shiv is causing in the present day, she’s old enough to know that much. What’s particularly on the nose today is that it fits into the rare occasion where Shiv finds herself no favor with either parent. More than a tough pill to swallow, it may as well be an impossibly large piece of fishbone lodged in her throat.

Roman was apparently in a great mood after they finished that disastrous meal—for the sweet sticker price of 20 million and the bonus of pre-ruining Shiv’s once-and-future Christmases, her brother was practically salivating at the thought of taking this trophy back to dad, which filled her with disgust. That, too, was hardly unexpected; Shiv always found something that would make her stomach turn or churn at mom’s dining table, regardless of the food served.

On their retreat from the dining room to the bedrooms, Shiv balled her fists and kept her eyes on the prize, steeled her will for the real reason why she flew to England. She was getting nowhere with Logan’s army of secretaries, and Roman wouldn’t tell her unless she’d beg. She saw that barely contained smirk stretched thin around the little gremlin’s lips and knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Shiv gritted her teeth as it took every fibre of restraint not to roll her eyes as she said the first two words. “Please, Rome. I have to see him tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah?” He put his hand besides his ear, fingers fanned out like a trumpet, so she turned aside to hide her eyeroll and said it again, “please”, then punched her brother’s shoulder as hard as she could right after he texted her the address.

Afterwards, it was hours of pacing around in this room where she barely spent her actual childhood, but was decorated for the little girl that she would have been in her mother’s house, had Logan not “stolen” Shiv across the Atlantic like Caroline said at her wedding. She wrote down a few pages of notes on how she might broach, respond, defend, typed up some keywords in her Notes app that looked like bad poetry mixed with corporate jargon, and then tore up all the paper before Shiv turned off the bedside lamp and stared at the ceiling, unblinking.

Staying the night at mom’s house for the first time in a decade feels odd, for a number of reasons. If Shiv wants to apply her mind in that direction, she can think of a few—but that’s not the kind of night she’s having, lying wide awake in a double bed that still feels too narrow for her body, the ugly light fixture is the only thing that stares back at her from the ceiling. Well, actually, she’s just being uncharitable; it’s not ugly, it’s just so very mom. Between that and the framed photo of 10-year-old Shiv that she knows Caroline dug out and plopped on the nightstand in anticipation of their overnight stay, she must conserve her mental energy strategically.

Eventually Shiv concedes that, in the absence of sleep that the banana she had before dinner is not enough to tide her over the night. The creeping feeling of hunger is more annoying than unbearable, but she’s going to have a very early, very dreadful morning and she can’t bear the added risk of losing any more hours of sleep because of something as trivial as this.

Bracing herself with very little expectations for what she might find in the kitchen, Shiv makes her way down the stairs in her pajamas—and this is how she finds Kendall, sitting at the kitchen table like a fucking punchline from the universe mocking her yet again for not setting her expectations low enough.

“Hey, how long have you been back? Didn’t hear you come in,” Shiv asks, nonchalant, walking up from behind him and dragging her slippered feet across the floor on her trek towards the kitchen counter.

“I don’t know, a couple hours,” something in his voice causes Shiv to pause after pulling out a drawer.

She turns to look at Kendall properly.

“Fuck,” is the first thing that comes out of her, out of concern or fear or just the stone-cold sobering realization of what this reminds her of—the sight of Kendall with his head hung low, both hands curled around a half-empty glass of water, same way he held that leather pill case. His speech dropped low and slow, that near catatonic state of stillness.

Kendall doesn’t react, like he hasn’t heard her at all.

“Hey,” Shiv says again, her voice softens before she can catch herself. She leaves the cabinet without closing the doors, pulls out the chair across from Kendall and sits. Already, her heart is racing. Any notion of sleep she might have built up earlier has gone out the window. “You okay?”

“Uh-huh,” he looks up at her, making blink-and-you-miss-it eye contact, and it’s dancy bullshit so Shiv keeps her eyes trained on him, counts down the seconds of silence in her head.

He speaks again, using real words at last. “I’m fine, Shiv. I talked to mom. She—she wants to talk to me in the morning, I think. I think that will help.”

Kendall looks up again and holds her gaze steady—or at least he tries—this time. Whatever has been eating away at him, whatever he was trying to drown out earlier at the pub, seems to have won out. He’s a stub of a candle burning down to the last bit of its wick.

Whatever it is, Kendall is resigned to let it hollow out his insides rather than telling her. That much she remembers from that night in their dad’s office.

“Go to bed, Ken, you can’t handle mom on a sleep-deprived brain,” Shiv tries to inject some lightness—tries to Roman it. She won’t do it again in mom’s kitchen, whatever the fuck that was in dad’s office, not tonight. Shiv has her own thing to get into with Logan come morning, she can’t have Kendall messing with her head now. The best thing for her right now is to rummage through the drawers, maybe the jars, find something of a quick bite and take her leave. Somehow her feet refuse to carry her away from the table, and her head can’t find the words to say.

“She left some crackers and grapes,” Kendall nods towards the kitchen counter behind Shiv, “if you’re peckish.”

Shiv follows his eyes and sees the plates. Those are indeed food that appears edible and not sickness-inducing, and they should be exactly what she needs right now.

“Was she eating them? Like, with her hands?”

“Yeah.”

“No thanks, then.”

Kendall nods. A hint of a smile ghosts over his thick lips, makes its way to his tired, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Hey,” Shiv says—a third time, this day has gone on for far too long—and leans forward, rests her chin on her hand, propped up by her elbow. “Do you think mom still keeps the candy jar in the same spot?”

“You wanna check?”

“Let’s find out,” Shiv pushes the chair back and her feet seem to get the hint, finally, as she stands up and drags the chair with her to the far corner of the kitchen. Once the chair is in position, she kicks off her slippers and steps up barefoot, reaches her arm to the very back of the very top row of the cabinet. It takes Shiv a few seconds to feel around for the woven texture of the box she’d known since she was a toddler, but she finds it, fishes it out.

“Yep, still there,” she steps off the chair and puts the box on the counter. She opens it, peeks inside. There are a few pieces of colorful hard candies in unmarked cellophane wrappers that seem to be of indeterminable age.

When Shiv looks over at the kitchen table, Kendall is looking over at her, too. “Not afraid of cavities anymore?”

Shiv shrugs, picks out a candy without looking. It’s a red one; when she peels it back the wrapper seems disgustingly sticky, but it’s probably fine. “Want one? It’s not bad.”

“N—” Kendall watches as she pops the candy into her mouth, then changes his mind as quickly as that. “Okay, sure.”

Shiv walks over with the box, tips its opening towards Kendall, who reaches in and picks one out. It’s green. She rolls the candy over on her tongue and hears the soft clicking sounds that it makes upon contact against her teeth. Its flavor has almost fully coated the insides of her mouth. She watches him pop it into his mouth like she did—and then immediately spits it back into the wrapper.

The look on Kendall’s face has Shiv snorting with an ugly, throaty giggle. Now that the farce is done, she picks up a piece of tissue to spit hers out, too. It tastes like expired cough syrup, but still worth it.

“What the fuck, Shiv?” He sounds surprised, annoyed, kind of exasperated—but he sounds like Kendall, finally.

“Yeah, it’s been a long day,” with that, it feels easy to rest her hand on his shoulder, pat him carefully with a gentle rub.

This can be a digestible form of consolation, and Kendall seems to agree. He raises his hand in search of hers, and she feels his cold fingers brush against the warmth of her thumb. In that moment it occurs to Shiv that, although she is left with a horrible taste in her mouth, somehow the hunger has passed. She is filled by the ghost of something else she will have to exorcise another day, but the feeling of fullness is enough for now.

Kendall drops his hand back into his lap. Shiv pulls her hand away to match his movement, watches as he stands up and steps out to the hallway.

“Good night, Shiv,” he makes his way up the stairs without turning around to look at her.

“Good night,” she whispers back before turning off the kitchen light. She’ll have to brush her teeth again.


End file.
